At St. Peter’s Church in St. George’s, Bermuda, the oldest Anglican church in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere, a photograph of the late Princess Diana with the then-Prince Charles has just been taken down. Removing the reminder of the King’s last visit to the island in 1982 was a matter of administrative prudence ahead of his arrival on Friday. A small gesture that reveals much about the respect and deference Bermudians feel towards the British monarchy.

The 2022 royal tour of the Caribbean by the Prince and Princess of Wales was defined by protest, demands for reparations and independence from the British Crown. Bermuda will not repeat that performance. In 1995, the island held an independence referendum that saw 74 percent of the electorate vote against a split from the UK.

It was, in many ways, a pragmatic calculation. Bermuda operates under the most devolved constitutional arrangement of any British Overseas Territory. Much like the reinsurance industry that thrives on the island, Bermuda ran the numbers, looked at the risks of total sovereign rupture and chose to retain the semi-autonomous settlement. In a jurisdiction of 64,000 people, prosperity runs on access to British passports, US capital and the kind of regulatory stability that independence movements have rarely delivered.

However, to describe the relationship as purely........

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